Practice Makes Perfect: Learning English at Home

Want to practice English at home with your child but not sure where to start? Keep reading for some simple tips!

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Helping your child learn English at home can be tricky - it may be hard to find time outside of work, you may not be a confident English speaker yourself or maybe you just don't know where to start!

The best way to keep your child interested in learning English, is to make it a fun and rewarding experience for them, so they will look forward to class and want to learn with you at home! Here are some simple suggestions of things you might like to try at home:

1. Reading

Encourage your child to read in English. This will improve their vocabulary,

confidence and enjoyment of the language. Encouraging your child to read doesn't have to mean long novels though - there are all sorts of ways to enjoy reading!

For children ages 3-11 not try reading some of the short interactive stories on the Oxford Owl e-book library? The stories are accompanied by audio files so you can listen to the correct pronunciation as you go! They even have a collection of non fiction books so you can learn all about how to build a castle, make a comic or even see what lives in the deep sea!

For a quicker read, why not check out the British Council's short stories and articles, arranged by difficulty and accompanied by a quick quiz at the end.

Older students and more advanced readers aged 16+ may also find it interesting to read the science, culture and environment sections of online British newspapers, although each will have their own political perspective! The Guardian has a great arts and culture section, while National Geographic has some really interesting articles about science and the natural world.

2. Play Games

There are lots of way to gamify learning English and this can be really useful for keeping younger learners interested.

For younger students treasure hunts can be an interactive and fun way to practice English. You can adjust the instructions to make the game very simple or more challenging. For example, find me something yellow or find me something that rhymes with the colour blue (shoe, glue..)

There are also lots of online games which are great for practicing English vocab - check out this quick spelling word game or this site which lets you create your own bingo cards!

3. Write stories

Use a random word generator to generate 3-5 words and use those words to inspire a story or a drawing which you could then help your child to annotate or caption. This can be a fun and spontaneous way to inspire your writing without getting "writers block".

Here's one to try out: "uniform, lane, singer" ... what kind of story do you think this would be?

Do you have any creative ideas for learning at home? Share them with us below!

See you in class! 👋